Why not enable installing on 64bit machines with 32bit EFI>

ExpandCollapse

New Member

Since ElementaryOS draws some inspiration from the OS X and MacOS UI paradigm, I think this would be a comfortable place for Mac refugees to start at. Since a lot of those users are often advanced users of tools and tend to believe in the concept of paying for things, they may be exactly the kind of end-users that Elementary wants to attract.

Apple released quite a few models of Mac that incorporated 64-bit processors but used a 32-bit EFI. Most of these systems are now out of support from Apple, but the hardware is sometimes perfectly capable of running a modern OS like Elementary.

In order to install Elementary on two such systems, both 2007-era iMacs with Core 2 Duo processors, upgraded to 4gb ram and an SSD boot drive, all I had to do was add bootia32.efi to the EFI/BOOT folder on the installation USB - that's all.

The rest of the install was exactly as to be expected from installing on Apple hardware: holding the Alt/Option key after the start chime to run the installer, once installed and rebooted, open the AppCenter and install the wifi firmware under Updates which auto-detected the hardware (requires an Ethernet connection to install the update).

So the short story is, why not add support for installing on systems with 32-bit EFIs? All it requires is the addition of a single ~600kb file to the installer ISO, and you suddenly support a significant chunk of hardware that some of your target users probably have kicking around on ancient versions of MacOS or laying in a closet somewhere.

About The Community

We all love our beautiful elementaryOS Linux Desktop. Such amazing and simply powerful at the top of an Ubuntu core. These forums are the non official community hub to help each other and discuss threads. Try elementaryOS Linux now, jump into the community.